I know, I know -- "sequelized" isn't a word, but it's the most fitting label I can come up with. Ever since 300 hit theaters in March 2007, there has been talk of creating some kind of spin off. Would it be a prequel? Would it be a sequel? Would it be some demented fever dream invented by one Cinematical blogger on a late Colorado night?
Well, someone finally asked a 300 alumni other than poor Gerard Butler. IESB.net caught up with director Zack Snyder, who revealed that 300 would receive the sequel treatment. Snyder did the impossible, and actually spoke to Frank Miller about it, and learned he's writing a graphic novel that takes place between Thermopylae and the Battle of Plataea which is seen at the end of the film. There's a mere year in between waiting to be populated with new Spartan heroes (though David Wenham's lone survivor, Dilios, could return) by way of Miller's pen. Snyder promises to direct the adaptation when Miller finishes the book.
There's certainly historical material to draw from -- the time between Thermopylae and Plataea was marked by several battles -- the naval Battle of Artemisium, which occurred alongside Thermopylae, and the Battle of Salamis. Both were victories for the Greek states (although Artemisium could be argued to be a draw), but not without cost. Several Greek cities, including Athens, suffered severe Persian attacks.
But while the Greco-Persian Wars are ripe for many stories and movies, I don't see any of them fitting the hyper-stylized mold of the original graphic novel or the film. The insanity of it all worked because it had a legendary story and king to anchor it down, and shine through the blood-splatters and giant rhinos. Why water that down? As fond as I am of Snyder, Miller and violent boys in leather pants, I wish they would just let the Spartans lie.
Liam Neeson's thriller Taken hasn't hit stateside yet -- but it looks like its director, Pierre Morel, already has another job. Relativity Media acquired the rights to Arne Schmidt's screenplay Hunter-Killer, based on Don Keith and Commander George Wallace's novel Firing Point.
Hunter-Killer fills a giant gap in today's cinema -- there just aren't enough movies set on submarines. (Have you ever toured one? If you can stop yourself from imitating Sean Connery or Das Boot, they really are terrifying places to be.) The story follows an American submarine commander and a team of Navy SEALS who must avert all-out war, rescue the Russian President in the midst of a coup, and defeat a renegade Admiral. No word on casting yet, but it will be fun to see what up-and-coming action stars land the macho parts -- particularly since American cinema is reportedly quite short of them.
It sounds a bit like The Hunt for Red October, which isn't a bad thing -- and it's a pretty timely choice for Relativity in light of recent geopolitical events. After Eastern Promises, I thought we were going to see Russian mafia dramas replace the Italian and Irish ones ... but instead, the Russians are making a huge comeback as the villains of action cinema. Coincidence, or savvy optioning on the part of Hollywood? Who knows? It definitely feels like 1980 again ... and I'm okay with that. Are you?
The release date of Australia is a mere month away, yet there's been little in the way of promotion for it. A few posters, a new release date, a few interviews with Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman -- that's it. While this could spell a lack of confidence, I think it's largely due to the fact that Baz Luhrmann was still tinkering with the film as of August.
But at last, there is a new trailer, courtesy of MSN, but sans embed code. It's an odd trailer. It starts off in a style that's quite contemporary, both in the cinematography and the music, and then shifts into the style (complete with choir) that one normally associates with an epic period piece. And while I know that Kidman and Jackman fight off an evil cattle baron and the Japanese invasion, little of that plot comes through. But it certainly looks beautiful, sweeping, romantic (love the peek at the love scenes), and exciting .... and maybe, just maybe, that's enough. Well, that and the shot of Jackman about 30 seconds in ....
In Miracle at St. Anna, four African-American soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines in Italy near the end of World War II; caught between indifferent leadership and hostile troops, the four fight to survive -- and protect the Italian villagers they've come to know during their exile. Director Spike Lee spoke with Cinematical from New York about the challenges of film financing in modern Hollywood ("it's hard to get stuff made today that's not superhero, comic-book, TV show, sequel stuff. ..."), shooting in an 800-year-old Italian town (" ... all we had to do was take down the satellite dishes ...") and the challenges his new film faces (" ... historically, women do not run to see, or even walk to see, or even crawl to see World War II films ..."), The Wire ("'Omar's Coming!'"), sequel possibilities for Inside Man and more.
Lee even touched on politics and race in the here-and-now: "I'm optimistic. We're going to have a Black president. The 44th President of the United States is going to be a Black man ... I think this is a definite indication of how far America has moved in how it views race. ..."
Cinematical: I was very curious if you could talk a little bit about the genesis of what brought you specifically to Miracle at St. Anna as a film?
Spike Lee: I needed something to read; I went into my wife's office; looked up on her shelf upon shelf of books (laughs) and the spirit told me to go to this one book -- all the time my head is twisted to the side, trying to read the titles -- read this title, Miracle at St. Anna; that sounds interesting; take the book off the shelf, see the cover of a Black soldier with a young Italian kid, World War II, said "Let me read this. ..." After the first chapter, I said "I want to make this into a film, called up James McBride, we met ... and here we are. That's the abbreviated version. ...
(With Miracle at St. Anna opening this week, we at Cinematical are re-running our review from the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.) By James Rocchi
Spike Lee's films have always been fraught with the potential for greatness and disaster, shuddering with a nervy wire-walking energy that makes them superb when they stay on the narrow space between ambition and execution and gives you a long time to watch the fall when they don't. But that, of course, is what makes them worth watching; for but one example, the only thing more shocking than the realization that there was a musical number in Malcolm X was the realization of how superbly it worked; Lee's films are rarely undeniably perfect, but they are always undeniably his.
So it is with Miracle at St. Anna, a bold, sprawling, messy epic of war and faith set behind enemy lines in 1944, as a group of four African-American soldiers are trapped far from their fellow troops in German-occupied Italy. There are moments here where the film does not work, where you can feel the sharp needle of disbelief or dislocation puncture the film mercilessly, and there are other moments that are not only willing but indeed eager to look at big, challenging, relevant issues of race and power, war and justice, faith and failure. These moments -- and there are many of them -- not only speak to Lee's unwavering skill and commitment as a filmmaker, but also to the singular nature of his talent and will. When Miracle at St. Anna falters, it's in the moments that seem like they could have been crafted by any other film maker; when Miracle at St. Anna succeeds, it's in the moments that could only have been crafted by Lee.
I would be a huge dork if I began this post with the sentence, "This is the best news ever," but it kind of is. One of my favorite (and yours too) scriptwriters is making a return to the big screen -- and may it be a triumphant one. According to Variety, Shane Black is directing Cold Warrior for Universal Pictures from a script penned by Chuck Mondry. This will be his second outing as a director -- his first was, of course, the fantastic Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
And frankly, Warrior sounds like a film from the heyday of 80's action. It centers on a spy from the Cold War era who comes out of retirement and teams up with a younger agent to thwart a Russian domestic terrorism plot. It couldn't be more timely given how icy relations are with our Eastern neighbors. (The Russians didn't get to take much of a break from big-screen villainy, did they? I thought their comeback would just arrive via the Russian Mafia, not as terrorists again.)
This is going to be a blast to watch -- from the description, I want to believe it's old-school Black, but it could just as easily go into dark and serious Breach territory. Obviously, my fondness for macho men, snappy one-liners, and heavy gunfire hope it's the former. That's the kind of movie that can cure all ills and make you forget your economic woes, isn't it?
I think this is the quietest week in the land of the nerdy since I started here at Cinematical. No major casting news from Marvel, no new graphic novels optioned, no reboots announced. It was a pretty crazy summer when it came to superheroes -- maybe everyone is just really tired. Nevertheless, let's look at what has come across the wire, shall we? It's a very verbal day -- Alan Moore still hates Hollywood, William Shatner is still annoyed at JJ Abrams, and M. Night Shyamalan is all wistful. There's plenty to discuss here!
Geoff Boucher interviewed Alan Moore over on HeroComplex and finds him as intractable as ever when it comes to the upcoming Watchmen movie. He believes it sounds like "more regurgitated worms" as Hollywood is wont to produce. (Not just of his work, mind you, but of films in general.) He even hinted that its recent legal woes (which he finds "wonderfully ironic") might, in fact, originate from his corner of the world. "Perhaps it's been cursed from afar, from England. And I can tell you that I will also be spitting venom all over it for months to come." I'm not surprised, but I do wish he could concede that there are good films just as there are bad comic books. Can we send him something by Darren Aronofsky? Perhaps a gift set of The Fountain and its graphic novel companion?
The film is based on Jon Ronson's book of the same title, and follows his investigation into the secret wing of the U.S. First Earth Battalion, a paranormal research unit created in 1978. Its goal was to create "Warrior Monks," supersoldiers who could do all sorts of comic-booky things like walk through walls, become invisible, read minds, and kill creatures by staring at them long enough. One soldier in Ronson's book claims he killed a hamster and a goat doing just that.
The adaptation is already switching things around a bit -- it's set in Iraq (where some of the supersoldiers have been reportedly deployed), and McGregor will be playing a stand-in for Ronson named Bob Wilton. He's desperate for a story, and stumbles upon the craziest one of a lifetime when he meets Lyn Cassady, played by Clooney, who claims to be a secret psychic soldier, reactivated after 9/11. As they travel through Iraq, investigating the story, they meet Bill Django, played by Bridges, who is the founder of the program and Cassady's mentor. Spacey will play Larry Hooper, another former psychic who is running a prison camp in Iraq.
While the topic of psychic supersoldiers seems to lend itself to comedy, Iraq and prison camps don't, so who knows what tone this will strike. Every actor in this can switch effortlessly from dramatic to quirky -- it's going to be a treat seeing them all in one film. Especially one with psychics and goat murders.
Based on journalist Mark Boal's real experiences following bomb disposal experts in Iraq, The Hurt Locker isn't just a welcome return to big-screen action from director Kathryn Bigelow (who has wrung both fame and infamy with Near Dark, Strange Days and Point Break). It's an assured, confident, swaggering piece of moviemaking that manages to not only evoke every war of the 20th century but also, despite the claims by makers and some reviewers that it's an 'apolitical' film, speaks very specifically to the Iraq war. Even so, plunging us into the thick of things alongside the highly-trained men (and they're all men here) who defuse bombs for the Army, Bigelow and Boal avoid the speeches and postures and long, contemplative talks of home front films like Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Elah by staying in Iraq, and they shun the loopy, loony formal experiments of Brian De Palma's Redacted. Boal and Bigelow stay laser-focused on one group of men with a singular mission, and make us live in the constant possibility of death. Viewed from half a world away, a bomb is a political concern; viewed from less than a foot away, a bomb's just a high-stakes exercise in problem-solving, where making a mistake means a final, terminal education in the physics of expanding gases.
The Hurt Locker follows three soldiers -- bomb tech James (Jeremy Renner) and his subordinates Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldrige (Brian Geraghty) into the jaws of death; it's all last names in The Hurt Locker, as seen on patches and heard in urgent radio dispatches. Early on, Bigleow establishes that people will be killed in this film -- with a bravura sequence that depicts a bomb's detonation on the macro and micro level, billowing bursts of smoke and pressure and flame intercut with gravel and dust leaping choreographed in lockstep by the pressure wave, as if God had slammed his fist on reality hard to make a point -- and while Renner, Mackie and Geraghty are fine actors, they're also unknown enough to subconsciously let us know that they aren't safe from what may happen.
Spike Lee's films have always been fraught with the potential for greatness and disaster, shuddering with a nervy wire-walking energy that makes them superb when they stay on the narrow space between ambition and execution and gives you a long time to watch the fall when they don't. But that, of course, is what makes them worth watching; for but one example, the only thing more shocking than the realization that there was a musical number in Malcolm X was the realization of how superbly it worked; Lee's films are rarely undeniably perfect, but they are always undeniably his.
So it is with Miracle at St. Anna, a bold, sprawling, messy epic of war and faith set behind enemy lines in 1944, as a group of four African-American soldiers are trapped far from their fellow troops in German-occupied Italy. There are moments here where the film does not work, where you can feel the sharp needle of disbelief or dislocation puncture the film mercilessly, and there are other moments that are not only willing but indeed eager to look at big, challenging, relevant issues of race and power, war and justice, faith and failure. These moments -- and there are many of them -- not only speak to Lee's unwavering skill and commitment as a filmmaker, but also to the singular nature of his talent and will. When Miracle at St. Anna falters, it's in the moments that seem like they could have been crafted by any other film maker; when Miracle at St. Anna succeeds, it's in the moments that could only have been crafted by Lee.
The Hurt Locker sees director Kathryn Bigelow craft a big, booming tale of tension based on journalist Mark Boal's experiences and interviews with bomb disposal experts in the streets of Iraq. Toronto didn't just see The Hurt Locker earn raves from many critics; it also saw the film get picked up by Summit Entertainment for distribution. Cinematical spoke with Bigelow and Boal in Toronto about breaking the audience's unconscious link between an actor's salary and a character's destiny, whether or not their film is really apolitical, the fun and excitement of blowing things up on-set, how making the movie yourself is the best way to be sure you make the movie you want to and much more.Cinematical's podcast content is now available through iTunes; you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:
As ever, you can download the entire podcast right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.
They've both been Mean Girls, both acted for Nick Cassavetes, both appeared in wedding movies and now both Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried will have shared the honor of being the leading lady in a Nicholas Sparks adaptation. For McAdams, it was 2005's beloved weepy The Notebook; for Seyfried, rising fast after starring in the hugely popular Mamma Mia!, it's Dear John. According to Variety, the 22-year-old has been cast as Savannah, a virginal college student who falls in love with a soldier on leave (and named John, of course) immediately prior to 9/11. Kind of like Pearl Harborbut with more letters than explosions.
The soldier is being played by Channing Tatum, who will be fresh from G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra when Dear John hits theaters, likely a year from now. Meanwhile, Seyfried will have costarred in the third season of HBO's Big Love, which begins airing in January, and opposite Megan Fox in the Diablo Cody-scripted Jennifer's Body. Dear John is being directed by Lasse Hallström (Chocolat) from an adaptation scripted by Jamie Linden (We Are Marshall). Shooting begins next month in South Carolina.
Will Smithreally wants a crack at the ancient history epic, and this time it looks like he's going to get it. According to Variety, Smith has hired the go-to guy for historical epics, Randall Wallace, to pen The Last Pharaoh for him to star in.
It won't actually be about the last pharaoh of Egypt (Cleopatra still holds that distinction), but Taharqa, a member of the Nubian dynasty of Egypt, who ruled from 690 to 664 B.C.E. Mentioned by Greek historian Strabo as one of the greatest military tacticians in the world, he's believed to be Tirhakah, king of Ethopia, who's mentioned in the Old Testament as driving Assyrian king Sennacherib away from destroying Jerusalem. Taharqa wasn't just a fighter, though -- he was devoted to peaceful works like restoring temples, and building sanctuaries all over Nubia and Egypt. Nevertheless, his biggest claim to fame is fighting the Assyrians, who invaded Egypt in 677. He didn't exactly defeat them -- they took Memphis and established the 26th dynasty, and Taharqa was driven back to Nubia, where he died in 664.
It definitely has the potential of an action packed story, but I'm curious as to how it's going to be fleshed out. With Wallace (nearly) at the helm, I am willing to bet Taharqa will become a mix of King Leonidas and William Wallace. The saving of Jerusalem is, I think, the high point of the story and has the most historical relevance ... but it's not as romantic as defending one's homeland, and that's reportedly what the film will focus on. And Wallace's scripts tend to be heavy on the romance, iffy on the accuracy. Still, it will be very interesting to see Smith in a sword-and-sandals epic, and I'll watch ancients hack each other onscreen anytime. What about you?
Gerard Butler may have once sported the greatest eight-pack in the history of mankind, but his punishment for it (besides all the puking and crying I assume happened in the shaping of it) will be to answer questions about a 300 spin-off until the end of his career.
While at the Toronto Film Festival, where many of my lucky colleagues are, Butler was asked again about the franchise potential of 299 dead Spartans by Superhero Hype. "I've heard some backroom chatter, but nothing more, so I don't know if it would be a sequel or a prequel. I don't want say anymore than that, because I really don't know. I haven't read anything. I can't see it myself -- sequel for me absolutely not, but I just mean the idea generally, I'm really not sure which way they would go with that."
He was asked this same question at RocknRolla's ComicCon junket, and his answer then suggested he'd actually been approached with a more solid idea. "No. They mentioned it, and we'll leave it at that. It's a very interesting idea, I have to say."
By "interesting" idea, I keep imagining that the story involves King Leonidas being resurrected by a necromancer to fight an unspeakable evil. (That's actually going to be written into a spec, I just know it.) But honestly, it really must suck to be Butler sometimes. He's got his own production shingle, he's going to be directed by Frank Darabont any day now, and everyone just wants to know when Leonidas is going to be resurrected by a necromancer.
Why doesn't anyone direct the question to Frank Miller? He's supposed to be the one writing it.
(Thanks to MoviesOnline for their transcript of the RocknRolla junket -- I still curse my tape recorder.)
One man to not truly break through the 1980s stigma and revamp his career is Eric Stoltz. James Spader did a heck of a job with it, now being smarmy fun on Boston Legal, as did the likes of Jon Cryer, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and more. But then again, even Stoltz's '80s classics, Mask and Some Kind of Wonderful, were drowned by the likes of Molly Ringwald and her swarm of teen romances, so it's not like he ever had a bit spotlight.
Stoltz remains a bit on the outside, but still working as hard as ever. He's got a bit of a role in Milk, and now Variety reports that he's joining a wartime indie drama called Fort McCoy. Along with the likes of Brendan Fehr, Camryn Manheim, Lyndsy Fonseca, Seymour Cassel, and Kate Connor, Stoltz is nestled in Wisconsin shooting the true story, based on a script from Connor.
McCoy centers on "a barber who moves with his family during WWII to a POW camp in Wisconsin, where the children are the sole youngsters on the base -- save for a German teenager who forges an alliance that crosses language barriers with the barber's little girl." I imagine we can see how this plays out sometime during next year's festival season, with hopefully a release after that.
I know, I know -- "sequelized" isn't a word, but it's the most fitting label I can come up with. Ever since 300 hit theaters in March 2007, there has been talk of creating some kind of spin off. Would it be a prequel? Would it be a sequel? Would it be some demented fever dream invented by one Cinematical blogger on a late Colorado night?
Liam Neeson's thriller Taken hasn't hit stateside yet -- but it looks like its director, 
I would be a huge dork if I began this post with the sentence, "This is the best news ever," but it kind of is. One of my favorite (and yours too) scriptwriters is making a return to the big screen -- and may it be a triumphant one. According to 
I think this is the quietest week in the land of the nerdy since I started here at Cinematical. No major casting news from Marvel, no new graphic novels optioned, no reboots announced. It was a pretty crazy summer when it came to superheroes -- maybe everyone is just really tired. Nevertheless, let's look at what has come across the wire, shall we? It's a very verbal day -- Alan Moore still hates Hollywood, William Shatner is still annoyed at JJ Abrams, and M. Night Shyamalan is all wistful. There's plenty to discuss here!
Do you remember a George Clooney project, green-lit in May, 
They've both been 
One man to not truly break through the 1980s stigma and revamp his career is 
